#hope-mirrlees

[thepersonalwords]

But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can giveimpudence to his betters!

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

[refulgently-transcendental]

haven’t had yelling at the sky annotations in awhile! brought to you by Lud-in-the-Mist

[lizziestudieshistory]

My current reads. Yes I'm rereading Emma for the third time this year. No I will not take any criticisms.

Lud-In-The-Mist is looking promising.

I'm also reading When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Penman on my ereader, it's very early but I'm liking it!

[paullovescomics]

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror books that I read in the second half of 2023, part 1 of 3

[nodeadfandoms]

A Caravaggio's Fruit binding of Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees!

[judgeitbyitscover]

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo

Ballantine Books, March 1970

Lud-in-the-Mist, the capital city of the small country Dorimare, is a port at the confluence of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dapple has its origin beyond the Debatable Hills to the west of Lud-in-the-Mist, in Fairyland. In the days of Duke Aubrey, some centuries earlier, fairy things had been looked upon with reverence, and fairy fruit was brought down the Dapple and enjoyed by the people of Dorimare. But after Duke Aubrey had been expelled from Dorimare by the burghers, the eating of fairy fruit came to be regarded as a crime, and anything related to Fairyland was unspeakable. Now, when his son Ranulph is believed to have eaten fairy fruit, Nathaniel Chanticleer, the mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, finds himself looking into old mysteries in order to save his son and the people of his city.

[chasemisprintedlies]

"A bad conscience makes a very good ghost."

Hope Mirrlees

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[sophia-sol]

Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees

Lud-in-the-Mist is a fantasy novel published in the 1920's, well before the modern genre of fantasy was really established. It's so interesting to read a fantasy novel from that time before Tolkien dropped like a meteor into the genre landscape, affecting everything from thereafter; everything post-tolkien was either written with inspiration from Tolkien, or in reaction against how much everything was written with inspiration from Tolkien, I feel like. But this one is doing its own thing, but in a way that feels to me maturely developed, as if it came out of a long tradition of fantasy novels just like it, even though it definitely didn't.

I've previously heard Lud-in-the-Mist being praised as a perfect gem of a novel, but although I enjoyed it, I would definitely not go that far. I've also heard it be called things like sweet, and lovely, which led me to certain expectations of the tone of the book which ended up to be rather inaccurate!

The novel takes place in a prosaic town in a vaguely British-feeling secondary world, in the country of Dorimare. The town is close, however, to a boundary with Faerie, and fairy fruit keeps getting smuggled in, with great effect on those who eat of it. The book opens slowly, with an exploration of the setting and context of the story, which I found very interesting, but eventually the major characters and plot are introduced. The long and short of it is: how to keep the fairy influence out of their town?

The book is very good at setting and place and atmosphere, at creating a sense of the liminal space between Faerie and Dorimare. The characters all feel fairly realistic and believable also. But I just couldn't bring myself to care much about most of the major characters, which was a real problem! They're mostly fairly unpleasant people, but I don't think that's what was keeping me at a distance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I think is a book very much in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist, is also a novel about a collection of mostly-unpleasant characters, but I find all of them compelling. I'm not sure what JS&MN is doing differently on it than LitM!

Anyway I'm glad I read it, and I would love to read more books like it…but preferably with characters I like better lol.

[secretnameofeverydeath]

"Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot be permanent."

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-mist

[quordleona03]

Classic Fantasy in English

250 years, 69 books, 48 writers

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift - 1726

Fairy Tales Told for Children - Hans Christian Andersen - 1835-1863 tr. Mrs. H. B. Paull 1867-1872

The Water-Babies - Charles Kingsley - 1863

Alice in Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll - 1865/1871

Mopsa The Fairy - Jean Ingelow - 1869

At the Back of the North Wind, George MacDonald - 1871

The Princess and the Goblin/The Princess and Curdie - George MacDonald - 1872/1883

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - R. L. Stevenson - 1886

The Happy Prince and Other Stories - Oscar Wilde - 1888

News from Nowhere - William Morris - 1890

The Book of Dragons - E. Nesbit - 1901

The Just So Stories - Rudyard Kipling - 19021

Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie - 1902-1911

The Enchanted Castle - E. Nesbit - 1907

Puck of Pook's Hill/Rewards and Fairies - Rudyard Kipling - 1906/1910

Lud in the Mist - Hope Mirrlees - 1926

The Midnight Folk - John Masefield - 1927

Dr. Dolittle in the Moon - Hugh Lofting - 1928

Patapoufs et Filifers / Fattypuffs and Thinifers - André Maurois - 1930/tr. Rosemary Benet 1940

The 35th of May, or Conrad's Ride to the South Seas - Erich Kästner - 1931, tr. Cyrus Brooks 1934

Jirel of Joiry - C. L. Moore - 1934-1939

The Tale of the Land of Green Ginger - Noel Langley - 1937

My Friend Mr Leakey - J. B. S. Haldane - 1937

The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien - 1937-1955

Le Petit Prince / The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1943 tr Katherine Woods

The Wind on the Moon - Eric Linklater - 1944

Mistress Masham's Repose - T.H. White - 1946

The Little White Horse - Elizabeth Goudge - 1946

Trollkarlens Hatt / Finn Family Moomintroll - Tove Jansson - 1948 tr. Elizabeth Portch 1950

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - 1949

Seven Days in New Crete - Robert Graves - 1949

The Borrowers / Afield / Afloat / Aloft / Avenged - Mary Norton - 1952/1955/1959/1961/1982

All You've Ever Wanted / More Than You Bargained For - Joan Aiken - 1953/1955

To the Chapel Perilous - Naomi Mitchison - 1955

Tom's Midnight Garden - Philippa Pearce - 1958

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis - 1950

The 13 Clocks - James Thurber - 1950

Round the Bend - Neville Shute - 1951

The Armourer's House - Rosemary Sutcliff - 1951

The Once and Future King - T. H. White - 1938-1958

Candy Floss / Impunity Jane / Miss Happiness and Miss Flower - Rumer Godden 1954 / 1960 / 1961

Sword at Sunset - Rosemary Sutcliff - 1963

Book of Heroes - William Mayne - 1966

Tree and Leaf\Smith of Wootton Major - J. R. R. Tolkien - 1945-1967

The Crystal Cave / The Hollow Hills / The Last Enchantment / The Wicked Day - Mary Stewart 1970-1983

Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey - 1968

A Wizard of Earthsea / The Tombs of Atuan / The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin - 1968/1971/1972

Red Moon and Black Mountain - Joy Chant - 1970

Tom Ass or The Second Gift - Ann Lawrence - 1972

The Dark Is Rising/Greenwitch/The Grey King - Susan Cooper - 1973 / 1974 / 1975

[thoughtfulfangirling]

"But man can't live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion—the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart's content... And he creates a monster to inhabit it— the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies.

—Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees

[refulgently-transcendental]

monday motivation ✨

[lizziestudieshistory]

Book Recommendation Struggle

I'm struggling to find good recommendations - if anyone could suggest a good historical fantasy or whimsical fantasy I'd be grateful! Along the lines of Susanna Clarke, Guy Gavriel Kay, or Lud in the Mist. Even something along the tone/style of The Silmarillion - although I've been looking for this for 13 years and never found something to match Tolkien in this book...

Context/related moan below the cut.

I'm really struggling to find decent book recommendations these days. I'm pretty sure a large part of it is a rapid change in my tastes that I'm finding difficult to accommodate (not for lack of trying)... So most of my old "buzzwords", for lack of a better term, no longer work for me which makes looking for recommendations very difficult. It also doesn't help I'm pretty out of step with what most popular bookish social media enjoys, except on the rare occasion.

So, I've been retrying StoryGraph because Goodreads is useless for genuinely helpful recommendations and I haven't updated my Goodreads properly in about 4 years. Very haphazard at best! And a lot of people swear by StoyGraph for their approach to reading.

Now, I am actually uncomfortable with the stats side of it - I have a habit of leaning too far into that aspect of modern social media reading and it's toxic for my enjoyment. Seriously it was killing my love around the time of the pandemic. But I was willing to dabble for a bit to try and find some good suggestions.

However, I'm finding StoyGraph is just as useless? I've imported all my reading data (thank god for the journals!) for the last three years, filled out the preferences form a few times to try and hit the right spot, and still getting books I'm not enjoying or are promoted everywhere else... I'm increasingly frustrated by the trends in popular modern fantasy yet these books are being rammed down my throat at the moment.

[laufire]

Yes, the farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people’s memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered.

Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees.

[ajsbookreviews]

“Every tree can be a gallow, and every man has a neck to hang.”

— Master Polydore Vigil